1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer-based software development planning, and particularly to an interactive early defect removal model to compare baseline development practices to alternate practices.
2. Description of Background
As large-scale software development projects are created with tens of thousands of lines of code, numerous defects can be unintentionally injected along the way. The defects can be injected in various stages of development, such as requirements generation, design, and coding. Defects discovered later in the development cycle are typically associated with greater expense, since a large amount of work may be required to correct the defects, retest and verify the corrected product. Proper scheduling is critical to control costs and meet target completion dates. With large development teams, the impact of delays associated with longer development time is amplified as additional man months of labor can be added to the total development cost of the product.
Organizations that develop software typically follow a standardized development model and create project specific development plans based upon the standard model. Planning resource allocation may be based upon historical data from past projects that followed the same standard model. This approach can provide relatively predictable results that may include limited incremental improvement, but it does not lend itself to significant improvement over past performance results.